Feast Day of Fools

by James Lee Burke

  “A shit pile of people. They’re going to cook you in a pot, too,” Krill said.

  “That’s why you came in by yourself?”

  “Who are you guys?” Krill said.

  “Your worst nightmare, fuckhead.”

  “In my nightmares there are no guys like you. I don’t have space in my head for guys in Halloween masks or guys who frighten little girls with knives. These are not the guys of nightmares. These are clowns and eunuchs who were born with penises but no cojones. Why would guys like these be in anybody’s nightmares? That would be a great mystery to me.”

  “Antonio, don’t speak to these men,” the woman said.

  “I was just clarifying my thoughts to myself, Magdalena. These men and their cleverness are a great mystery to me,” he said. The yard was empty, the light dying in the trees, the windmill spinning against a horizon that looked as though the clouds were dissolving and running down the sides of the sky. Then he saw Negrito moving from behind the barn and around the front of the house, bent low, his greasy leather hat pulled down tight on his head, the M16 gripped with both hands, his heavy, truncated body moving with the fluidity of an animal’s. In the distance, he thought he heard the thropping sound of a helicopter’s blades.

  “Take me but leave the child,” the woman said to the man holding the gun to Krill’s head.

  “That’s not a problem,” the man replied. “But this guy is. Who is he?”

  “A man seeking forgiveness. He’s no threat to you,” she said.

  “You a coyote, buddy?” the man with the gun asked.

  “No, hombre. I’m a Texas Ranger. I’ve been shooting the shit out of guys like you for many years.”

  “You’re a real wit, all right. So smart you came in here and stuck your head in a mousetrap.”

  Then Krill heard banging and shuffling noises at the front of the house, booted feet coming down hard on the gallery, and a door flying back against a wall. Krill felt his heart drop. Two more men, each wearing the same masks worn by the men inside the house, were pulling and shoving Negrito into the living room. Blood leaked in a broken line from under the brim of Negrito’s leather hat, running through one eyebrow, streaking the stubble on his cheek. His face was lit with a grin as wide as a jack-o’-lantern’s.” ¡Qué bueno! Everybody is here!” he said. Then Negrito saw the expression on Krill’s face, and his grin faded. “These cobardes come up behind me. I’m sorry, Krill,” he said.

  “So you’re the one they call Krill. We’ve heard about you,” the man behind Krill said.

  The helicopter passed overhead and circled over a field and began to descend on the rear of the property, the downdraft flattening the grass, blowing dust and desiccated cow manure in the air.

  “Hey, Krill, I know who these guys are. They’re Sholokoff’s people,” Negrito said.

  “No, we have no interest in these people or the business they conduct,” Krill said.

  “Ain’t that right?” Negrito said to his captors. “You work for that Russian prick. We know all about you. I hear a couple of your guys are missing their noses. Be nice to me, and maybe I’ll tell you where their noses are and you can glue them back on.”

  Negrito, Negrito, Negrito, Krill thought.

  The man behind Krill stepped back and looked at both Krill and Negrito like a photographer arranging a studio portrait. “This is quite a pair,” he said.

  “What do you want to do?” said the man holding the knife to the little girl’s throat.

  “Take the girl in the kitchen.”

  “And?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know, man. I don’t know if this gig has parameters or not.”

  “There’s a key sticking out of the lock in the pantry door. What does that tell you?”

  “Lock her inside?”

  “Brilliant,” the man with the gun said. “Then take the woman to the chopper.”

  “What about these two?”

  “That’s a good question,” the man with the gun said.

  “I’ve got a question for you,” Negrito said.

  “You’ve got a question? Wonderful. What is it, greaseball?” the man with the gun said.

  “If you’re born without cojones, does that mean you’re automatically a queer, or is it something you learn? ‘Cause I believe every guy who ever called me a greaseball was probably a maricón. Know why I think that? ’Cause when I was in jail in Arizona and Texas, it was always the Aryan Brotherhood guys who were trying to get me in the sack. That’s right, man. Macho gringos like you was the main yard bitches in every joint I was in. I tell you what, man. ’Cause you look like a nice guy, I’m gonna do something for you. You surrender to me and Krill, I’ll fix you up with some punks that ain’t got a feather on them. You gonna dig it, man.”

  “We’re wasting time here, Frank. What’s it gonna be?” one of the other men said to the man with the gun.

  “We split the difference,” Frank replied. “Krill is the guy who kidnapped the Quaker. Josef will want to talk to him. The ape seems to have a death wish.”

  “Listen to me, hombre,” Krill said. “Negrito is a good soldier. He can be of value to you. He will never give up information to the FBI. Pain means nothing to him. His only defect is he runs his mouth when he shouldn’t. But he can be a valuable man to your employer.”

  “I see your point,” the man with the gun said. “We’re all just making a buck. We shouldn’t let it get personal. I totally understand where you’re coming from.”

  No one in the room moved. In the silence, Krill could hear the little girl whimpering. The man who had been holding a semiautomatic on Negrito put it away and looked at the .357 he had taken from Krill. It was nickel-plated and had black checkered grips, and each chamber in the cylinder was loaded with a hollow-point round. “Your name is Negrito?” he said.

  “That’s my nickname. It’s ’cause I’m mestizo.”

  “Do you mind riding in a helicopter?” the man asked.

  Negrito shrugged and gazed out the window, his eyes dulling over, his mouth downturned at the corners.

  “Because we don’t want you to be uncomfortable. Can you handle heights? You don’t get airsick or anything like that?”

  Negrito looked at Krill. “We had some fun, didn’t we, amigo? They’re gonna remember us for a long time. Don’t let this guy get to you. We’re better than any of them. We’re stronger and smarter and tougher. Guys like us come back from the dead and piss in their mouths and shit in their mothers’ wombs.”

  Krill stood frozen, the sound of the helicopter blades growing louder and louder in his head, the dust swirling in the downdraft, the rain clouds forming into blue horsetails, the windmill shuddering against the sky, all of these things happening simultaneously as the man with the .357 lifted the barrel and fired a solitary round through one side of Negrito’s head and out the other.

  HACKBERRY HOLLAND WAS reading a biography of T. E. Lawrence under a lamp by his front window when he heard thunder rolling in the clouds far to the south, reverberating in the hills, where occasionally a flash of dry lightning would flicker and then die like a wet match. The book was written by Michael Korda and dealt with the dissolution of empires and a new type of warfare, what came to be known as “wars of insurgency,” all of which had their model among the sand dunes and date palms of Arabia. As Hackberry read the lines describing the white glare of the Arabian desert, he thought of the snow that had blanketed the hills south of the Yalu the first morning he had seen Chinese troops in their quilted uniforms, tens of thousands of them, many of them wearing tennis shoes, marching out of the white brilliance of the snowfield, heedless of the automatic-weapons fire that danced across the fields and the artillery rounds that blew geysers of snow and ice and dirt and rock in their midst.

  He closed the book and placed it on his knee and stared out the window. Not far down the road, he could see a tree limb that had fallen across the telephone line that led to his house. Just as he got up to c
heck the phone, he saw a cruiser turn off the road into his drive, its emergency bar rippling, its siren off. Hackberry stepped out on the front porch and watched R. C. Bevins get out of the cruiser and walk toward him on the flagstones, his face somber. “You tried to call?” Hackberry said.

  “Yes, sir, your phone’s out. Your cell must be off, too.”

  “It’s in my truck. What is it, R.C.?”

  “We’ve got a homicide at the Ling place. The victim appears to be Hispanic. From the exit wound in his head, I’d say somebody used a hollow-point. A ten-year-old girl had been left in Ms. Ling’s care and saw it all. When her mother came for her, she found the girl locked in a pantry. Ms. Ling is gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  “From what the little girl said, there were six guys in masks. They took Ms. Ling and a friend of the dead man on a helicopter.”

  “How long ago?”

  “A couple of hours.”

  “Did you print the victim?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get a priority with AFIS.”

  “Pam is already on it. Who do you reckon are the guys with the chopper?”

  “Josef Sholokoff’s people.”

  “The little girl said the dead man and his friend spoke Spanish. She also said the friend had a pistol on one hip and a long knife on the other.”

  “What else did she say about him?”

  “She said he was tall and that he had funny shoulders. She said they were too wide, like he had a stick pushed sideways inside his shirt.”

  “That’s Krill.”

  “What would he be doing at Ms. Ling’s place?”

  “I don’t have any idea, none at all.”

  “You okay, Sheriff?”

  “How long have you been trying to get me?”

  “About fifteen minutes. There wasn’t no way you could know the line was down.”

  “Was Ms. Ling hurt?”

  “The little girl said a guy shoved her down. The same guy held a knife at the little girl’s throat. She said they all had gloves on, and the shooter called the dead man a greaseball. You think these are the same guys who crucified Cody Daniels?”

  “What’s your opinion?”

  R.C. scratched at his eyebrow. “I think we got a special breed on our hands,” he said. “I think all this is related to that Barnum boy we got locked in our jail. I’m not sure if we done the right thing on that.”

  PAM TIBBS WAS waiting for Hackberry when he arrived at the jail. She was not wearing makeup, and there were circles under her eyes. “What do you want to do?” she asked.

  “About what?” he said.

  “Everything.”

  “Did you talk to the FBI yet?”

  “I reported the homicide and the kidnapping. I didn’t mention our boy in isolation,” she said.

  “You’re uncomfortable with that?”

  “I don’t know what you’re doing, Hack. I don’t know what the plan is.”

  “They’re going to call.”

  “The abductors are?”

  “You bet.”

  “Then what?”

  “We’ve got what they want. As long as Barnum stays in our hands, Anton Ling will be kept alive.”

  “Hack, they wouldn’t have grabbed her if we hadn’t locked up Barnum.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To take a nap,” he said.

  He went up the spiral stairs and pulled a mattress from a supply locker into an alcove off the corridor and lay down on his side with his head cushioned on his arm and fell asleep with far more ease than he would have guessed, knowing that his dreams would take him to a place that was as much a part of his future as it was his past. He remembered the words of the writer Paul Fussell, who had said he joined the army to fight the war for its duration and had discovered that he would have to fight it every day and every night for the rest of his life. In his dream, Hackberry returned once again to Camp Five in No Name Valley and the brick factory called Pak’s Palace outside Pyongyang. The dream was not about deprivation or the harshness of the weather or the mistreatment visited upon him by his captors. It was about isolation and abandonment and the belief that one was totally alone and lost and without hope. It was the worst feeling that anyone could ever experience.

  In the dream, the landscape changed, and he saw himself standing on a precipice in Southwest Texas, staring out at a valley that looked like an enormous seabed gone dry. The valley floor was covered with great round white rocks that resembled the serrated, coral-encrusted backs of sea tortoises, stranded and alone, dying under an unmerciful sun. In the dream, he was not a navy corpsman but a little boy whose father had said that one day the mermaids would return to Texas and wink at him from somewhere up in the rocks. All he saw in the dream was his own silent witness to the suffering of the sea creatures.

  “Jesus Christ, wake up, Hack,” he heard Pam Tibbs say, shaking his arm.

  “What? What is it?” he said, his eyes filmed with sleep.

  “You must have been having a terrible dream.”

  “What’d I say?”

  “Just the stuff people yell out in dreams. Forget it.”

  “Pam, tell me what I said.”

  “‘He takes people apart.’ That’s what you said.”

  The telephone call came in one hour later.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  FROM HIS OFFICE window, he could see flecks of rain blowing in the glow of the streetlights, the traffic signal at the intersection bouncing on its support cables, the electrical flashes in the clouds that ringed the town. “Don’t try tracing this,” the voice said.

  “You’re too slick for us?” Hackberry replied.

  “You know what we want. Deliver him up and there won’t be any problem.”

  “By now you’ve probably figured out I’m a bit slow on the uptake. What is it you think I have?”

  “‘It’ is a Quaker with a hush-puppy accent who by all rights is our property.”

  “Somebody snitched us off, huh?”

  “Spying on you hasn’t been a big challenge, Sheriff. You seem to leave your shit prints everywhere you go.”

  “Should we decide to deliver up our Quaker friend, what are y’all going to do for us?”

  “Give you your Chinese girlfriend back, for one. For two, you’ll get her back looking just the way she did the last time you saw her. Are you getting the picture?”

  “I don’t know if it’s the electrical storm or that peckerwood speech defect, but you’re a little hard to understand.”

  “We have another guest here, a guy whose father you did scut work for. We’re gonna let him be a kind of audiovisual aid for you. Hang on just a second. You’re gonna like this.”

  The caller seemed to remove the phone from his ear and hold it away from him. In the background, Hackberry could hear voices and echoes inside a large room, probably one with stone or brick walls. “Turn up the volume for Sheriff Holland,” the caller said.

  Then Hackberry heard a sound that he never wanted to hear again, a cry that burst from the throat and reverberated off every surface in the room and died with a series of sobs and a whimper that the listener could associate only with hopelessness and despair.

  “That’s Mr. Dowling, Sheriff,” the caller said. “As you’ve probably gathered, he’s not having a good morning.”

  “You abducted Temple Dowling?”

  “It’s more like he abducted himself. All we had to do was get a little girl to perch her twat on a bar stool, and Mr. Dowling was in the net. Want to talk to Ms. Ling?”

  Hackberry could hear his own breath against the surface of the receiver. “Yes, I would,” he said.

  “You’d like that?”

  “If you want to negotiate, I need to know she’s there.”

  “She was with Civil Air Transport, wasn’t she? What they called the Flying Tiger Airline?”

  “If that’s what she told you.”

>   “She didn’t tell me anything. She didn’t have to. She has a tattoo of the Flying Tiger emblem on her ass. Have you ever had an opportunity to see it—I mean her ass?”

  Hackberry’s mouth was dry, his heart hammering, his breath coming hard in his throat. “No matter how this plays out, I’ll be seeing you down the track. You know that, don’t you?”

  “You still think I sound like a peckerwood? I’d like to hear you say that one more time.”

  Hackberry swallowed, a taste like diesel oil sliding down his throat.

  “No?” the voice said. “We’ll give you a little time to think over your options. Noie Barnum belongs to us, Sheriff. Want to throw away Ms. Ling’s life for an empty-headed government pissant? Do the smart thing.”

  “Why does he belong to you?”

  “Mr. Dowling cost my employer a great deal of money. Barnum is the payback. Tell you what. I’m gonna send you a package. Check it out and we’ll talk again. In the meantime, I’m gonna take personal care of Ms. Ling. Don’t worry, I won’t touch a hair on her head. Promise.”

  The line went dead.

  ANTON LING’S CAPTORS had placed her in a subterranean room that was cool and damp and smelled of lichen and the river stones out of which it was made. Three ground-level barred windows that resembled slits in a machine-gun bunker gave onto a scene that seemed out of place and time: a sunrise that had the bluish-red color of a bruise, a meandering milky-brown river from which the fields had been irrigated an emerald green, livestock that could have been water buffalo grazing in riparian grasses. But the people tending animals or working in the fields were not Indo-Chinese peasants; they were Mexicans who had probably eaten breakfast in the dark and gone to work with the singleness of purpose that characterized all workers whose aspirations consisted of little more than getting through the day and returning home in the evening without involving themselves in the political considerations of those who owned the land.

  The floor was concrete, once covered with a carpet that had molded into a mat of black thread. Against one wall was a wooden bed with a tick mattress on it, and a toilet in the corner with a partition that partially shielded it from view. The bars in the door were sheathed in flaking orange rust, and the stones in the wall had turned black and oily with the seepage of groundwater. Someone had scratched a Christian cross on one stone; on another was a woman’s name; on another were the words Ayúdame, Dios.